Public Opinion Toward Advertising Scale

What it measures

The POTA is the most comprehensive validated measure of consumer attitudes and beliefs about advertising as an institution. Pollay and Mittal (1993) developed the scale to capture the full range of beliefs consumers hold about advertising — both positive (advertising informs, entertains, and supports the economy) and negative (advertising promotes materialism, corrupts values, and is deceptive) — and to identify which belief dimensions predict overall attitude toward advertising and criticism of advertising. The scale organises seven belief dimensions into two higher-order groupings: Personal Use beliefs (product information, social role and image, hedonic/pleasure) reflect what advertising does for individual consumers; Social Effect beliefs (good for economy, materialism, value corruption, falsity) reflect the perceived societal impact of advertising. Pollay and Mittal (1993) found that Personal Use beliefs are the strongest predictors of overall positive attitude toward advertising, while Social Effect beliefs — particularly Value Corruption and Falsity — are the strongest predictors of advertising criticism. The scale enables segmentation of consumer populations by their advertising belief profiles and has been extensively used in cross-cultural comparative research on advertising acceptance and regulation attitudes.

Representative items

• Advertising provides useful information about products and services. (PI)
• Advertising tells me what kinds of people buy certain products. (SRI)
• Sometimes I enjoy advertising as much as other media content. (HP)
• Advertising helps raise our standard of living. (GE)
• Advertising makes people buy things they don't really need. (MAT)

Citation

Pollay, R.W., & Mittal, B. (1993). Here's the beef: Factors, determinants, and segments in consumer criticism of advertising. Journal of Marketing, 57(3), 99–114.